The 10 Best Data Scraping
Tools and Web Scraping Tools

Published 2019-04-05 By The Scraper API Team

Web scraping, web crawling, and any other form of web data extraction can be complicated. Between obtaining the correct page
source, to parsing the source correctly, rendering javascript, and
obtaining data in a usable form, there's a lot of work to be done.
Different users have very different needs, and there are tools out
there for all of them, people who want to build web scrapers without
coding, developers who want to build web crawlers to crawl large sites,
and everything in between. Here
is our list of the 10 best web scraping tools on the market right now,
from open source projects to hosted SAAS solutions to desktop software,
there is sure to be something for everyone looking to make use of web
data!

1. Scraper API

Who is this for: Scraper API is a tool for developers building web
scrapers, it handles proxies, browsers, and CAPTCHAs so developers can
get the raw HTML from any website with a simple API call.

Why you should use it: Scraper API is a tool for developers building web
scrapers, it handles proxies, browsers, and CAPTCHAs so developers can
get the raw HTML from any website with a simple API call. It doesn't
burden you with managing your own proxies, it manages its own internal
pool of over a hundreds of thousands of proxies from a dozen different proxy
providers, and has smart routing logic that routes requests through
different subnets and automatically throttles requests in order to avoid
IP bans and CAPTCHAs. It's an excellent crawlera alternative or luminati
alternative, with special pools of proxies for crawling ecommerce
listings, search engine results, reviews, social
media sites, real estate listings and more! If you need to
scrape millions of pages a month, you can use this form to ask for a
volume discount.

2. Smartproxy

Who is this for: Smartproxy is for
anybody looking for a reliable proxy provider at reasonable prices.

Why you should use it: Smartproxy has over 10
million rotating residential proxies with location targeting and flexible
pricing. They offer all sorts of niceties like rotating sessions, random
IPs, geo-targeting, sticky sessions, and more. They allow for unlimited
connections and threads, charging by bandwidth (between $3 and $15 per GB
depending on volume). They also offer a 99% SLA with low failure rates
and 24/7 technical support with a 5 minute response time.

3. Octoparse

Who is this for: Octoparse is a
fantastic tool for people who want to extract data from websites without
having to code.

Why you should use it: Octoparse is the perfect tool
for people who want to scrape websites without learning to code. It
includes a point and click interface, allowing users to scrape behind
login forms, fill in forms, input search terms, scroll through infinite
scroll, render javascript, and more. It also includes a hosted solution
for users who want to run their scrapers in the cloud. Best of all, it
comes with a generous free tier allowing users to build up to 10 crawlers for free.

4. ParseHub

Who is this for: Parsehub is an
incredibly powerful tool for building web scrapers without coding. It is
used by analysts, journalists, data scientists, and everyone in between.

Why you should use it: Parsehub is dead simple to
use, you can build web scrapers simply by clicking on the data that you
want. It then exports the data in JSON or Excel format. It has many handy
features such as automatic IP rotation, allowing scraping behind login
walls, going through dropdowns and tabs, getting data from tables and
maps, and much much more. In addition, it has a generous free tier,
allowing users to scrape up to 200 pages of data in just 40 minutes!

5. Scrapy

Who is this for: Scrapy is an open
source tool for Python developers looking to build scalable web crawlers.
It handles all of the plumbing (queueing requests, proxy middleware,
etc.) that makes building web crawlers difficult.

Why you should use it: As an open source tool,
Scrapy is completely free. It is battle tested, and has been one of the
most popular Python libraries for years. It is well documented and there
are many tutorials on how to get started. In addition, deploying the
crawlers is very simple and reliable, the processes can run themselves
once they are set up.

6. Diffbot

Who is this for: Enterprises who
who have specific web scraping needs.

Why you should use it: Diffbot is different from most
web scraping tools out there in that it uses computer vision (instead of
html parsing) to identify relevant information on a page. This means that
even if the HTML structure of a page changes, your web scrapers will not
break as long as the page looks the same visually. This is an incredible
feature for long running mission critical web scraping jobs.

7. Cheerio

Who is this for: NodeJS developers
who want a straightforward way to parse HTML.

Why you should use it: Cheerio offers an API similar
to jQuery, so developers familiar with jQuery will immediately feel at
home using Cheerio to parse HTML. It is blazing fast, and offers many
helpful methods to extract text, html, classes, ids, and more. It is by
far the most popular HTML parsing library written in NodeJS.

8. Beautiful Soup

Who is this for: Python developers
who just want an easy interface to parse HTML, and don't necessarily need
the power and complexity that comes with Scrapy.

Why you should use it: Like Cheerio for NodeJS
developers, Beautiful Soup is by far the most popular HTML parser for
Python developers. It's been around for over a decade now and is
extremely well documented, with many tutorials on using it to scrape
various website in both Python 2 and Python 3.

9. Puppeteer

Who is this for: Puppeteer is a
headless Chrome API for NodeJS developers who want very granular control
over their scraping activity.

Why you should use it: As an open source tool,
Puppeteer is completely free. It is well supported and actively being
developed and backed by the Google Chrome team itself. It is quickly
replacing Selenium and PhantomJS as the default headless browser
automation tool. It has a well thought out API, and automatically
installs a compatible Chromium binary as part of its setup process,
meaning you don't have to keep track of browser versions yourself.

10. Mozenda

Who is this for: Enterprises looking
for a cloud based self serve web scraping platform need look no further.
With over 7 billion pages scraped, Mozenda has experience in serving
enterprise customers from all around the world.

Why you should use it: Mozenda allows enterprise
customers to run web scrapers on their robust cloud platform. They set
themselves apart with the customer service (providing both phone and
email support to all paying customers). Its platform is highly scalable
and will allow for on premise hosting as well.

The open web is by far the greatest global repository for human
knowledge, there is almost no information that you can't find through
extracting web data. This list of tools will help you take advantage of
this information for your own projects and businesses. Happy scraping!

Ready to start scraping?

Scraper API is a tool that handles proxies, browsers, and CAPTCHAs so
developers can get the HTML of any web page with a simple API call. Get started with 1000 free API calls or contact sales.

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Our Story

Having built many web scrapers, we repeatedly went through the tiresome
process of finding proxies, setting up headless browsers,
and solving CAPTCHAs. That's why we decided to start Scraper
API, it handles all of this for you so you
can scrape any page with a simple API call!